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How AR Is Helping Workers Be More Efficient

18 April, 2017

Ido Lechner, Home Editor

In Brief

Mobiliya is on a mission to streamline the work and productivity of industrial workers

When the average consumer thinks of augmented reality, they imagine an overlay filled with apps most pertinent to their daily activities—things like text messages, social media, web browsers and GPS. While we’re not too far away from a future with widespread AR, more immediate and practical applications for the technology exist in an industrial setting, where service engineers currently use these devices to design and repair various equipment. Leading this disruptive, cutting-edge movement within the space, AR solutions provider Mobiliya is on a mission to streamline the work these employees do to increase productivity and revenue while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry for performing these tasks by simplifying operations. To better grasp how the startup is impacting the modern era of service repairs, PSFK got the chance to sit down in an exclusive interview with CEO Krish Kupathil and CTO Ankush Tiwari to discuss the company’s all-in-one AR 360 platform.

“Imagine you have a complicated machine that needs regular maintenance. The typical way to achieve this task is to ship printed manuals and train service engineers (multiple levels of training) and then they go ahead and do it. While we all understand that that’s not the best delivery method for training employees, up until now there hasn’t been anything to suggest a better alternative” opens Tiwari.

Most of us are aware that engineering is a discipline rooted in certainty and the ability to quantify, and while that’s surely the direction we’re headed in as a society, it often times translates to difficult-to-navigate interfaces that glamorize performance and output while neglecting more qualitative aspects of the job. Ironically then, by setting their sights on machine efficiency without updating the infrastructure for training recruits, many firms are actually making their service engineers less efficient due to the steep learning curves associated with engaging with new components of something as complicated as a medical machine or elevator.

“Now imagine that you’ve integrated augmented reality capabilities into the equation, with users being able to point a tablet to the same machine, and it will guide them in an animated way with clear-cut steps to address a particular component or situation at hand. The whole experience delivered is very visual, intuitive and easy to perform” explains Tiwari.

Mobiliya’s approach is one that makes sense on multiple fronts – AR is a technology designed to unobtrusively ‘augment’ work and leisure (as the name suggests), and enables these employees to tackle foreign issues without much pre-existing knowledge of the dilemma. Kupathil goes on to explain that the industry suffers from a high churn rate, since the antiquated processes currently in place discourage many service engineers from continuing their work in the field. And since you can’t dumb down the machines at play without a) forgoing a device’s necessary capabilities and b) forking over loads of money to remove and install new ones, the only remaining option is to change the infrastructure that keeps them up and running.

“Our ultimate goal here is to eliminate the need for a printed manual, which doesn’t accurately represent a real-life scenario” says Kupathil. “To that end, we’re designing software that can run on HMDs (head-mounted displays), phones, tablets and so forth. The technology will let you stream live machine data to a back office where you can get additional expertise through communication with other people feeding you more information, regardless of where the two of you are in the world.”

Complete with deployment for enterprise distribution, easy-to-manage content portals, top security features and backend systems integration, this innovative technology solution is redefining the way enterprises engage with their work. With AR having proven itself outside the scope of entertainment, the technology is projected to account for more than $30billion USD in sales by 2020, with Mobiliya playing a focal role in b2b, industrial sales. Moreover, its predicted that by 2030, immersive interfaces, such as head-mounted displays (HMDs), will have replaced all other user experience paradigms in 80 percent of use cases that require human-to-machine interactions. At the forefront of this new wave of digitization, Mobiliya is poised to reshape physical labor, communication and how we interface with foreign technology.

When the average consumer thinks of augmented reality, they imagine an overlay filled with apps most pertinent to their daily activities—things like text messages, social media, web browsers and GPS. While we’re not too far away from a future with widespread AR, more immediate and practical applications for the technology exist in an industrial setting, where service engineers currently use these devices to design and repair various equipment. Leading this disruptive, cutting-edge movement within the space, AR solutions provider Mobiliya is on a mission to streamline the work these employees do to increase productivity and revenue while simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry for performing these tasks by simplifying operations. To better grasp how the startup is impacting the modern era of service repairs, PSFK got the chance to sit down in an exclusive interview with CEO Krish Kupathil and CTO Ankush Tiwari to discuss the company’s all-in-one AR 360 platform.